Courses

How can we leverage new knowledge to positively impact our most pressing contemporary problems? Since 2005, CGU has offered more than 80 courses that introduce students to the practices of transdisciplinary inquiry, fostering collaborative knowledge creation across fields that would not necessarily occur in traditional, single-discipline courses and empowering students to create new solutions to industry and societal issues.

Some of our current course offerings include:

Extremism in Society
Explores societal extremism and extremist behavior from the perspective of different disciplines—including religion, literature, history, political science, and sociology—with a significant emphasis on the psychology and behavioral science of extremism.

Working Across Cultures
Examines the challenges of working across cultures as well as how to tailor policies, programs, and management practices to take advantage of cultural diversity in work settings.

Exploring Judeo-Christian Knowledge Across the Disciplines
Surveys contemporary challenges to secularism in the Western academy, as well as how the intellectual principles of Judeo-Christian thought are foundational to various spheres of public and academic life.

Data Analytical Tools, Technologies & Applications Across the Disciplines
Focuses on using Big Data tools and technologies effectively across various disciplines and settings, including the social sciences, humanities, information systems, policy, and health care.

Cybersecurity in a Changing World
Examines the technical, social, economic, management, and policy dimensions to cybersecurity in order to understand the nature of cyber attacks, their risk to global stability, and effective methods to prevent them.

Social Entrepreneurship & Social Impact
Explores theories of entrepreneurship, organization, and social change, within the context of complex social, cultural, and political environments, to better understand how to develop successful social enterprises such as nonprofits and hybrid organizations.

Digital Humanities
Situated at the intersection of computing and humanities, CGU’s course in Digital Humanities examines how new information technologies have the potential to change not only how we conduct research but the kinds of questions we might ask within that inquiry.

Leadership & Followership
Explores key topics to give students a basic understanding of the theory and practice of leadership, examining ways in which research and knowledge of these topics can be applied in the workplace and focusing on individual leadership development.

Evaluating Evidence: Becoming a Smart Research Consumer
Systematically explores common logical and psychological barriers to critically analyzing evidence used to support empirical arguments, with the goal of making students better consumers of the empirical evidence found in everyday conversation, newspapers and magazines, the internet, and research from diverse disciplines.

Death
Through readings, lectures, and discussion in the field of “death studies” and other disciplines, this course provides an opportunity to witness the changes that have occurred in how death is experienced and in how it has been conceived from Greek antiquity to the present day.

The Rhetorical Construction of Disciplines
Examines how rhetoric—the study of how forms of discourse linguistically construct their objects of inquiry—offers a powerful and distinct way for conceiving of disciplines and their boundaries.

Wealth, Poverty & Inequality
Explores diverse literature on income inequality to offer a nuanced understanding of the issue and asks students to develop a multifaceted policy proposal to manage rising income inequality.

Regional & Global Rivalry in the Middle East
Analyzes the major factors that have overarching impact on struggles and conflict—including religion, culture, ethnic groups, and impact of history on the people living in the region—to offer students a deeper understanding of the impact of power rivalry in the Middle East.

Big Data Tools & Technology Across Disciplines
Focuses on using Big Data tools and technologies effectively across various disciplines and settings, including social sciences, humanities, information systems, policy, and healthcare.

Experimental Philosophy
Explores various aspects of experimental philosophy, drawing from journal articles and books in the field as well as those from relevant fields such as psychology, cognitive science, and economics.